Youth resistance against methods of coloniality is key to bringing attention to issues – specifically the performance aspect – and the methods of ‘green’ coloniality harm indigenous people most – the alternative is place-based land pedagogy to teach people where the land came from and the relationship between that and the case

However, they drew from their own experiences with the poor service provided to the poorer communities of color, away from downtown, by AC Transit. Some excerpted talk follows below: Zola: The bus takes hell of fucking long. You are stuck on this bus that smells like shit and … They make us pay hella money everyday and walk on, get on their bus. … Marcus: By where I live … the 64, the 64 doesn’t run on the weekend. … Zola: I don’t like County Transit. Why do they want to increase the thing to San Francisco? … We already got BART!5 As they deliberated, they grew increasingly angry about the narrowly conceived options before them, and the obvious directive to vote in favor of the host of alternative transportation reforms. They shifted their performance into a satire of how government policy meets the needs of people with privilege and in power. Amber: I’m gonna say sorry, but we all need new offices downtown so screw you guys. Ending deliberation, they re-entered the classroom/meeting hall. Marcus: By popular demand, we’re giving the money to the Freeway Development Corporation – Instructor: Really? Zola: And the rest of the money goes to buy our office supplies because – Marcus: because we all in the suburbs and – Hanifa: and we need an easy way to work and um – Marcus: So we never really cared about your situation, it’s nothing personal … Paul (a student not on the board, representing AC Transit): You’re ugly Marcus: We’re all Republicans, Paul. We don’t really care about your issues so – Hanifa: So we chose what was best for us and Freeway Corp is what’s most beneficial. Paul and other students: New board! New board! Instructor: That’s the first time that’s happened. Board: [laugh] Learning from youth resistance moves us away from individualizing the critique to the guest instructors’ teaching ability and cultural competency. Rather, youth resistance reveals key differences between what Keeling (2007) terms a ‘ghettocentric commonsense’ and commonsense environmentalism. The youth did not dispute the ecological advantages of bike lanes and public transportation. Environmental Education Research 119 However, they understood ghetto colonialism from a lived perspective, specifically how city planning has always disposed of poor communities of color. Bike lanes and buses, not to mention BART,6 falsely promised a ‘public’ transportation system because they worked differently for white7 cosmopolitans than for ghettoized peoples. Further, the youth detected the metanarrative within the lesson’s cartography of Oakland’s places and peoples. Downtown matters. Commuters count. Indeed, this urban ecology unit invited students to participate in their own disappearance: lend your voice to fixing the ghetto wasteland by paving bikeways and funding rapid commuter lines for the cosmopolitan citizen. By contrast, the students’ comments reflected everyday tales of dispossession within the very solutions of public infrastructure meant to ‘repair’ the ghetto wasteland. Youth rejected the settler environmentalist moral through a parody of power. They pulled out the meat ax, and pointed at it with glee. We never really cared about your situation. You are just people in the way. Their performance foreshadowed a future reality. A few years later, then-Mayor Jerry Brown would successfully redevelop downtown Oakland into expensive lofts and condos. When pressed on the costs of gentrification, he replied that Oakland had ‘discriminated’ far too long against middle and upper middle class people. The commuter bus would be extended to SF, and bike lanes put in place. Youth indeed began to disappear – from over 50,000 to fewer than 40,000 school-age youth in five years. Despite developments toward a greener city, urban youth and their communities would not fare any better. Urban educators have few tools for engaging settler colonialism because terra sacer often under-girds environmental education in urban schools. Environmental education offers three limited social justice frameworks: environmental racism – a framework that focuses on pain; green curriculum – a framework that focuses on rescue; and place-based curriculum – a framework that focuses on inclusion, and thus, the replacement of Native land/people with a multicultural immigrant nation. Despite their social justice intentions, and their ecological truths, when strung together, such pedagogies concerning US ghettos contain a settler colonial teleology. Pain curriculum8 highlights, legitimately, the disproportionate toxification of air, soil and water in poor, urban, communities of color. However, reducing ghettos to pain-filled sites of environmental toxicity in need of salvation, echo the settler colonial logics of terra sacer – wasteland whose inhabitants lack the liberal capitalist insights and technological know-how to properly occupy a city. Rescue curriculum follows logically from pain curriculum. It presents green solutions in the form of urban gardens, recycling, clean fuels, etc. It leans explicitly on green technologies and implicitly on the technologies of government. The hidden curriculum of rescue naturalizes city planning, urban redevelopment, and deghetto-fication as inevitable remedies for pain. It positions ghettoized communities as wards under settler colonial sovereignty. Rescue curriculum promotes green cities, a wealth of green consumption through which the multicultural cosmopolitan citizen earns his/her/our right to be the nouveau settler. Enter place-based curriculum. Place-based curriculum helps write the master narrative of future, green, metropolitan neo-colonies. Often inclusive, multicultural, and celebratory, such curriculum highlights the urban as a place of diversity, flavored by communities of color. (And wouldn’t you like to live here too?) Claiming the urban as a contact zone or multicultural home – whether by people of color, or by white 120 L. Paperson people – violently erases Indigenous understandings of that land and place. If Native people are mentioned at all, they are almost always only as a premodern population who were pleasantly ‘one with nature,’ or ecological Indians so few in number that the ecological settler becomes a ‘good neighbor’ or benevolent reinhabitant. Such a representation inscribes settler colonialism as a done deal, renders urban Native youth as inauthentic Indians, and denies contemporary Native relationships to urban land and place (Friedel 2011). The hidden curriculum of place-based pedagogy lies in its teleology. Native people used to live here. White people settled here; they fled. People of color replaced white people; they suffer. Coming up, the multicultural cosmopolitan citizen will replace people of color. When the Great American City is finally built, all the white people will be colorful, and all the colored people will be gone.